Chiang Mai, Thailand

Chiang Mai, Thailand. June 24, 5:13 p.m. local time: I just checked e-mail from a storefront Internet shop here. This small city is stuffed full of Internet storefronts -- there are signs hanging up everywhere: "Internet -- 20 baht / hour" -- 45 baht equal $1 U.S., so the price is right. The access from this storefront is faster than it was in my hotel in Bangkok (it was 28.8 there: torture).

I clipped an op-ed piece from the Asian Wall Street Journal on Thursday or Friday -- the subject was fiber bandwidth. The comparison was fascinating, and the gist, from memory, was this: In the mid-1980s, there was a shakeout in the computer business, and the companies that bet on bigger boxes (mainframes) with more processing power lost out to the companies that bet on small cheap boxes that let each user operate independently (PCs). The writer says a similar struggle is happening now between companies that are focused on adding more bits to each "channel" (it's not really a channel, it's a piece of the spectrum) and the companies that are adding more channels (colors) to each strand in their network. That is, a larger number of channels with small capacities per channel can be more efficient that fewer "fat" channels. The second strategy makes more sense, he said, and I was convinced. (This note is to make sure I don't forget to file that op-ed piece when I get home. Also check Lexis-Nexis to see if it ran in the WSJ too -- probably did.)